News

BT Wi-FI Hits Five Million Hot-Spots

May 14th 2013

BT Wi-fi has announced that it has reached more than five million hotspot across the UK and Ireland of which nearly 189,000 are in Northern Ireland Across the UK and Ireland the company has added more than 20,000 new hotspots each week over the past year taking the total to five million.

BT saw more than 400 million connections across its wi-fi network in 2012/13* and latest figures show users’ online wi-fi time is increasing, with minutes more than tripling in the same period.

Paul Convery, Head of Business at BT in Northern Ireland said,“We are seeing growing use of our network as wi-fi users spend more time online and use more data. People are now so confident and comfortable with their gadgets, we’ve had to meet the demand with more hotspots in a wider choice of places – on the high street and in thousands of neighbourhoods across the region.”

An incredible 13 petabytes of data (13 billionmegabytes) were consumed across BT’s Wi-fi network during 2012/13*. The volume is the equivalent of downloading 3.9 billion MP3s (iTunes currently has 26m songs in its library), or non-stop streaming of The Hobbit in HD for 1,042 years. If you were to take smartphone photos placed side by side, this amount of data would be over 624,000 miles long or long enough to wrap around the equator twice.**

Research conducted by BT and ICM*** has found that usage trends for wi-fi vary according to age. Most 18-24s favour wi-fi for social media, whilst the 35-44 age group chooses to shop online. Most 45-54s use it for GPS and mapping services, whilst the over 65s use wi-fi for finding discount vouchers or codes.

BT’s ownWi-fi apps are also proving popular with almost two million downloads by BT Broadband customers and are available in the relevant app stores forWindows, iOS, Android and Blackberry users.

All BT Wi-fi hotspots are free and unlimited for BT Broadband customers – although anyone can logon. It’s available at brands like Starbucks, GAME, John Lewis, Network Rail and Hilton plus millions of homes and thousands of independent businesses.